Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Photo Search

I love wasting time surfing through photographs on the photo-sharing site Flickr. One way to keep focused on interesting photographers is to carefully build a Contacts list of photographers that you admire. Another way is to use the Flickr Photo Search feature and search for keywords. The problem with Flickr's Photo Search is that it displays 23 images per returned page, and you have to spend a lot of time scrolling up and down that page just to see the 23.

(Half Moon Bay Pier, by Andy Frazer)

Two weeks ago, Thomas Hawk posted a blog entry about a new tool called FlickrLeech. This site, which I don't believe is associated with either Flickr or Yahoo!, uses the Flickr API to search for keywords, and then display nothing but thumbnails, 200 at a time, on your screen. You can then quickly eyeball the images that you're in. You can literally search through a few thousand images per minute.

Great for night photographers! Try entering the search phrases "nocturnes" into the FlickrLeech tool bar.